Falkirk Council is to hold a consultation on the regions open spaces and parks, it has been announced.

A new single strategic plan has been drawn up setting out a vision for the future of the areas.

The new plan has four key themes:

• Modernising park and open spaces.

• Addressing inequality and fostering community through open space investment.

• Working and investing more efficiently.

• Generating and capital and revenue for investment in parks and open space.

The previous five year strategy helped in delivering £55m of investment across the area, including:

• The Helix [A 350 hectare area of outdoor recreational park land between Falkirk and Grangemouth].

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• Improving the quality of the seven core parks.

• A number of improvements to play parks.

• Installing Multi Use Games areas at several locations.

Councillor Adruab Mahoney said: "The draft plan sets out assessments of sites across the council area and ideas for future development work. In recent years we've seen new 'Friends' of groups set up to support some of our parks. Hopefully that trend will continue and we can attract more community involvement.

"We've also been very successful in attracting good levels of grant funding to support parks and open spaces, most notably with the £25 million Big Lottery Grant which made the Helix possible.

"However, we also know that the next few years will be tough for the council. With this in mind, the draft strategy explores commercial options to bring more money into our parks – at the same time safeguarding free use by the community. There may also be areas which we'd declare surplus to requirements."

A twelve week consultation on the new Open Space Strategic Plan will be officially launched in November.

(LM/CD)